[001 - blogging the dissertation]

April 24, 2017 by alex christie

This blog is a work in progress and performance of writing my dissertation. Today is the first day of writing and research after turning in a draft of the proposal. I imagine this blog taking the form of both sharing relevant research, compressed/compiled for a more general audience, as well as a place to work through the contingencies of academic labor for both graduate and recent graduate students.

My dissertation is titled inadequate futures and positions posthumanism as a viable mode of intra-acting for sustainable futures in a moment of economic, ecological, and social precarity and catastrophe. Like much work about the nonhuman turn and the anthropocene, inadequate futures foregrounds a future devoid of the human, but rather than subsiding into existential dread or proffering ways of sustaining humanity, suggests reconfiguring subjectivity and ethics on new materialist and vitalist grounds in order to sustain something like an impersonal life, or a life more generally. Indeed, humanity will become extinct, but that doesn't mean that who/what we understand as human doesn't have radical ethical commitment to the environment or one another as we march towards demise. Instead, because matter is a performative intra-action that both humans and nonhumans are imbricated in and produced by, we need to think and act more affirmatively and sustainably with our environment and those that (co)inhabit it.